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| photo credit: tera.school.nz |
While not everyone may have learned to draw and paint realistically - drawing what they actually see rather than what they think they see - all of us have already learned to draw symbolically. As children we all go through stages of development in terms of drawing skills, one of which includes symbolic drawing, using a symbol to represent something else.
First there is the "Scribbling stage" at about age 12-18 months. This is mostly an enjoyable kinesthetic activity, incorporating many circular scribbles. At about 3 years of age comes the stage of symbols and stories as children discover that a symbol can stand for a real thing in the environment. Circles and lines come to represent many different things. According to Sandra Crosser, Ph.D. in her article When Children Draw, about the age of 3, most children begin to draw "tadpole guy."
"An important point is reached when the child converts the linear scribble into an enclosed shape. The enclosed shape seems to be the focus of the child's first attempt to make a realistic drawing. That first realistic drawing is frequently a primitive person. When lines are used as boundaries of objects we see a typical tadpole person, so named because it resembles a tadpole. One large circular shape with two lines extending as legs float on a page represents every man….Tadpole guy simply seems to be a symbolic, rather easy, and convenient way to convey the idea of a person."
Dr. Crosser goes on to say that "three- and four-year-olds develop other generic symbols for the repeated drawings of common objects like sun, dog, and house." At about age 8-10 children find that their symbols are limiting and try to draw more realistically, to capture how things actually look to them, but even as some progress to this stage of drawing, the ability to express ourselves through the use of symbols remains an innate human skill.
One artist who used symbols extensively in his artwork, and whose work has greatly influenced many other artists, is Paul Klee (1879-1940). As stated on the website TheArtStory.org about Klee:
"Klee was fundamentally a transcendentalist who believed that the material world was only one among many realities open to human awareness. His use of design, pattern, color, and miniature sign systems all speak to his efforts to employ art as a window onto that philosophical principle….Klee challenged traditional boundaries separating writing and visual art by exploring a new expressive, and largely abstract or poetic language of pictorial symbols and signs. Arrows, letters, musical notation, ancient hieroglyphs, or a few black lines standing in for a person or object frequently appear in his work, while rarely demanding a specific reading."
Klee had his own personal visual language and his paintings are filled with symbols and primitive drawings that express his inner psyche. Symbolism can in fact be a way to extract the inner workings of the psyche and discover more about yourself, and in so doing, to help you develop as an artist.
-XoXo
post credits: http://abt.cm/1xG7hVU
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